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PSA: Be kinder

A video in which men reading aloud nasty tweets sent to female sports reporters is making the rounds today. I’m not even going to link to it, because it’s so vile and sad and pathetic. You can Google it, though.

But I posted a mini-rant on my Twitter feed about it, and went a little further on my Facebook page:

So I watched the PSA on “bros” reading mean tweets to female sports reporters, and I have a few thoughts about the topic. After 18 years of doing what I do for a living, I can say this: That video is only a sliver of the ridicule and harassment I’ve seen against females in male-dominated realms, not just in sports journalism.

It’s not just the internet, either.

In my career I’ve been grabbed by men, pushed, swung at, threatened to my face, by phone, by email …

Even very recently, while covering a high school basketball tournament, I had another media member tell me, “you really hate the team you cover, don’t you? You don’t deserve your job.”

And I’ve had colleagues who have been asked, “are you actually okay with working with a female sports reporter?” It’s 2016, and I still don’t think some are, in general.

Oh, and I had a male coworker at my first job out of college who went out of his way to bully me. He knows who he is, and I think some of you do, too. But, whatever, he knows what he did.

Even worse, I’ve seen how misogynistic not just men can be, but women, as well. And that’s the worst part of it, when I see one female reporter bag on another for … actually doing her job.

I just gotta know … what kind of power do people think they get out of making the others the focus of their ridicule? This is how bullies operate, not human beings.

Bottom line, to quote my friend Bethany: Be kinder.

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Some of the other things I’ve encountered in 18 years of being a sports reporter. I’ve been laughed at by other reporters for the questions I’ve asked, I’ve had things thrown at me, I had a hockey player ask why I was allowed in a locker room (later on, I told him that he was so much better than that, and he apologized), I threatened to call the police on a parent who charged at me in the lobby of a high school because he didn’t like something I wrote about his son (um, the kid had an error that resulted in the game-winning run – fact), and that was scary. And thank God a school administrator was nearby to intervene.

Women don’t speak up about these kinds of instances, not just in sports journalism but in life. Think about how many sexual assaults and how much office harassment goes unreported. Or being accosted on the street. Or domestic violence. Or bullying at school. There’s a strange, innate fear that keeps people from doing something … and they should do something. That’s your right.

The other dirty little secret of this? Some of the people whom I’ve seen expressing outrage and shock because of the video, or retweeting and commenting on the video … are the same people whom I’ve seen treat their female peers like garbage.

Conversely, there are many good men – and good women – in sports journalism and in journalism. I value my professional and personal relationships with them, and they know what we go through.

One of my favorite tweets came last week from a reporter at the Miami Herald:

I cover the #FlaPanthers so there are bound to be fans of teams the Panthers play who follow me. No cursing, no name calling is all I ask.